Notepad++ is a free as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer" source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

A skinnable, customizeable, music organization library. It does ids, renaming/moving. folder organization /band/album/song.mp3 or /band/album-song.mp3 etc, totally custom It does file conversion and apple hardware, as well as android, blaclkberry, etc. simply the best library software in existence :

does more then mediamonkey and everything is free. inc. multicore processing, encodes, full DSP, etc). has an even better version called media center (apprx 40USD) that adds video and zones (sending different songs to different rooms [sets of speakers], and tons more!)

internet traffic control and monitoring tool. it lets you limit individual programs or your entire computer to a specific amount of bandwidth, and also has a basic but effective firewall that can block specific applications/services from internet access. The free version is just a monitor with no shaping/firewall capabilities

Internet Download Accelerator effectively solves three of the biggest problems when downloading files: speed, resuming broken downloads, and management of downloaded files. I know everyone has their manager, but i like this one :

This one was always a massive help when setting up a customer's PC "to their requirements". Update it, tell it the make + model of your router and your i.p. etc. and it forwards the requested ports on your router for you. I've always d/l'ed from majorgeeks as I didn't trust the look of any other sites that hosted it. Haven't used it for about a year though.

Scans all your minidump files created during "blue screen of death" crashes and marks the drivers found in the crash stack so you can easily locate the suspected drivers that might have caused the crash.

Lets you flash the BIOS on a motherboard where flashing by floppy is the only other means. I've needed this program for about the last 10 years! Only really useful if you're working on a lot of customer's old/oem rigs but useful nonetheless.

at first i was going to ask for paid software, to reflect the free list that's stickied, but i don't want to limit it and i'm asking for lesser know software either way.
agreed though, i bought a winrar license before i found 7zip. now as much as it pains me winrar isn't even installed

I use displayfusion instead of ultramon. it gives me multi-monitor taskbars and rotating per monitor backgrounds ... what else does ultra-mon do?

It puts an extra button at the top of every window that when clicked moves the window to the next screen. It also adds a button at the top of every window that lets you maximize the window fill all the screens.

But really I only use it for the same functions you use Displayfusion for.

Lets you flash the BIOS on a motherboard where flashing by floppy is the only other means. I've needed this program for about the last 10 years! Only really useful if you're working on a lot of customer's old/oem rigs but useful nonetheless.

This one was always a massive help when setting up a customer's PC "to their requirements". Update it, tell it the make + model of your router and your i.p. etc. and it forwards the requested ports on your router for you. I've always d/l'ed from majorgeeks as I didn't trust the look of any other sites that hosted it. Haven't used it for about a year though.

Suhidu's picked up on a lot of really good apps there, but I thought I'd just emphasize, this is a truly brilliant little application with a justifiably extensive following. If anybody here doesn't use this as their general text editor, do grab it and give it a whirl!

Suhidu's picked up on a lot of really good apps there, but I thought I'd just emphasize, this is a truly brilliant little application with a justifiably extensive following. If anybody here doesn't use this as their general text editor, do grab it and give it a whirl!

oh, what about VMWare Player? I don't see that mentioned a lot in these types of threads, but I used it all the time when I'm testing things that I'm not quite sure how they wil work, or I just want to play around with an OS that I don't feel like loading onto a real machine. Plus it is free, and probably one of the easiest to use virtualization programs I've seen.

I thought about it long and hard (for the last 3.5 minutes ) and the only thing I can recommend that I haven't seen mentioned much on this forum is: cygwin.

I know there are a lot of ways to integrate more linux features into Windows but I've found that cygwin has almost everything I need, plus a friendly package manager, and it makes porting apps a nearly trivial matter. It also has a very decent X server, extensive documentation, and a large community.

It's not for everyone obviously, and I still have an Ubuntu VM running perpetually, but it does add a huge amount of tools and capability to Windows.

The only other things I can think of are pretty well known:
Deskpins - For making windows "Always On Top"
VMware workstation - So much win
WinSCP - SSH/SFTP file manager client
I also wrote a blurb about accessing EXT3/EXT4 from Windows, which is something that I need to do from time to time.

Suhidu's picked up on a lot of really good apps there, but I thought I'd just emphasize, this is a truly brilliant little application with a justifiably extensive following. If anybody here doesn't use [notepad++] as their general text editor, do grab it and give it a whirl!

twilyth

Guest

The most powerful editor I've ever seen is the ISPF editor. It was originally written for the IBM mainframe environment but there is a PC version called SPFSE. There's no point in even looking at it unless you're familiar with ISPF.

It's structured so that you issue commands to manipulate the text from a command line above the text and the text is addressed via row and column position. By using pointers to the row an column in your commands, you can treat any block of text of any size like a matrix where each individual element can be accessed independently.

This sort of off topic in the sense that no one who hasn't worked with ISPF would ever use this, but it's certainly "lesser" known and is the most powerful editing software I've ever used.